Voice over Internet Protocol (Voice over IP, VoIP) includes a family of methodologies, communication protocols, and transmission technologies for delivery of voice communications and multimedia sessions over IP networks, such as the Internet. The steps involved in originating a VoIP telephone call include signaling and media channel setup, digitization of the analog voice signal, encoding, packetization, and transmission as IP packets over a packet-switched network.
VoIP can be used for voice or multimedia communications. VoIP transports these communications via the Internet, rather than the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).
As VoIP utilizes the Internet, Quality of Service (QoS) issues may arise due to Internet problems, such as network congestion, latency, or jitter. Other QoS issues for VoIP may arise due to faults or miscommunications with hardware (e.g., server devices, customer equipment, etc.). Problems that can occur that would affect QoS can include “terminating route looping,” which can include situations when telephone numbers are misrouted to incorrect or unconnected locations; “registration storms,” which can include customer mis-configuration of registrations that can cause VoIP telephones to re-register at shorter time intervals causing system overload; or “call quality traffic,” which can include irregularly high traffic due to customers hanging up and re-dialing for a better connection.